Agentic commerce, explained
How AI agents are changing online purchasing, and which protocols matter for making a catalogue legible to them.
Agentic commerce is purchasing where the buyer is software acting for a person. It changes three things: comparison becomes exhaustive rather than sampled, reaction windows compress from days to seconds, and the shopper reads structured data instead of a page.
Several open protocols now describe how agents and merchants transact. Publishing a catalogue in those shapes is what makes it legible to conversational commerce surfaces without a bespoke integration for each one.
The practical consequence for data: identity is increasingly published at the source, in structured markup and agent feeds. Matching stops being a machine-learning problem and becomes a join — which is good news for everyone except vendors whose moat was the matching model.
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